PC gaming drives Q4 revenue

Nvidia has posted its fourth quarter financial results of fiscal 2014. Ending on January 26, 2014, the manufacturer revealed its reported revenue was $1.14 billion, an increase of 8.6 percent compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013. Also, during the fourth quarter, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX GPU revenue saw an increase of almost 50 percent.

As good as it gets

This month EVGA is unveiling its GeForce GTX 780 as well as an all-new GPU cooling design dubbed ACX that it plans to stick on all its high-end GPUs for the foreseeable future. The cooler’s acronym stands for Active Cooling Extreme since it uses active cooling and it’s more extreme than getting a Red Bull enema.

Note: This review was originally featured in the October 2013 issue of the magazine

A fanless PC that looks like a router

It doesn't take a monster system to run Microsoft Office or surf the web, hence why we're starting to see so many small form factor (SFF) PCs as of late. One of the newest SFF rigs to emerge is the Asus Eee Box EB1037, which is a mini-desktop system that looks like a router but is a full-fledged PC build around Intel's Bay Trail platform with a Celeron J1900 quad-core processor clocked at 2GHz.

Includes several new and improved 3D Vision profiles

Itching to try out some new graphics drivers? You're in luck, provided you own Nvidia hardware and don't mind tempting fate by installing beta code. That's because Nvidia has made available its new GeForce 334.67 beta drivers, which introduce a variety of new SLI and 3D Vision profiles. Nvidia also baked in the obligatory performance and system stability tweaks that typically accompany each new driver release.

A peek at what's around the corner

Nvidia already owns the single-GPU performance crown, having plucked it back from the competition with the release of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics card two months ago after AMD snatched it from atop the GeForce GTX Titan's head. Now that it's back where Nvidia feels it rightfully belongs, the GPU maker has no plans of letting it go any time soon and will defend its crown with the upcoming launch of the GeForce GTX Titan Black Edition and dual-GPU GeForce GTX 790 video cards.

Available for a limited time only

Nvidia in October of last year unveiled its G-Sync monitor technology intended to reduce stutter, lag, tearing, and other unwanted effects associated with synching a monitor's refresh rate with the GPU. The company's goal is to integrate G-Sync into third-party monitors, though for a limited time, Nvidia is offering a G-Sync DIY upgrade kit that works with (and only with) Asus's 24-inch VG248QE display.

PCs win, plain and simple

It doesn't matter if you own an Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or every tablet that was every made -- you still won't be able to match the level of awesome that a PC can accomplish. To prove it, Gordon wandered over to Nvidia's booth where the GPU maker blew onlookers away with a triple monitor setup running at 12K. Yes, that's three 4K Ultra HD monitors, all attached to a monster gaming PC built by Origin PC.

Nvidia's new 64-bit CPU to be based around Kepler and feature 192 CUDA cores

We had the chance to attend Nvidia’s CES 2014 press conference and the company touched upon a number of topics such as GeForce Experience, G-Sync Monitors, and GameStream, but it was Nvidia’s announcement of its new “super chip” K1 that was the talk of the show.

The GTX 780 overclocking champ

Last month, we took a look at EVGA’s GTX 780, which sported a new, fancy-britches “ACX” cooler. This month, it’s Asus’s turn with its own redesigned and totally non-reference GTX 780. At first glance, this GPU’s most notable attribute is its redesigned cooler, which despite many changes still bears the DirectCU II moniker we’ve seen on previous models. The new design uses five direct contact (DC) copper heat pipes, one of which is a plump 10mm, along with a primary “hybrid” fan that has two sets of fan blades to blow air in two directions at once. The cooler takes up two PCIe slots, and has an aluminum backplate wrapped around it to help support the cooler and dissipate heat across the top of the card. Our favorite feature of this cooler is that it can be detached from the card with just four screws, making it easy to clean before company comes over.

Note: This review was originally featured in the November 2013 issue of the magazine.

Revisiting the top tech headlines of the past year

Another year is in the books and you know what? The PC isn't dead! Not that we ever thought our beloved platform was ever in jeopardy, though you wouldn't know it if you listened to analysts and market research firms predicting all kinds of gloom and doom for the desktop. We're happy to say the sky didn't fall, and as we look ahead to 2014, we're more excited than ever about all the advances in technology -- 3D printing, wearable computing, and advances in storage are just some of the things gaining momentum as we head into the new year.

Before we look too far down the road, however, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on some of the biggest news stories of 2013. We've put together a list of the most popular happenings of the past year based on a variety of factors including traffic, reader engagement, and of course editorial discretion. Some are included here because of their lasting impact on the industry, and others because they piqued the interest of you, our readers, and sparked lively debates.

Ready to get nostalgic with us? Then off we go as we relive the top 13 news stories of 2013!